Stuffed Sync is the tool that I have created in 2005 to help us in Stuffed Guys to synchronize the structure of two MySQL databases. It is now available as an open source project on GitHub. It has also been ported to the latest and greatest Stuffed System version 4 and there is a hope that its development will now continue.
Whatnot
11
Jan 10
Stuffed System goes open source
Stuffed System is a Perl framework that I have been working on for the past 8 years (since 2002!). It has just gone open source and is available now in full on github.
Stuffed Sync will follow soon.
Also — open source Stuffed Guys mini-site.
22
Nov 09
My new work setup
Added a 24 inch display to my Macbook Pro to increase the productivity. Like its size, resolution, colors and sound quality.
19
Nov 09
Posting from iPhone
I thought I’d try to do a test post in the blog from iPhone and post a just taken photo along with it as well. Sounds good?
4
Nov 09
37signals are afraid of long-terms plans
Finally, Jason Fried of 37signals has confessed —
We don’t have big, long-term plans, because they’re scary…
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-way-i-work-jason-fried-of-37signals_pagen_2.html
17
Jul 09
IE not recognizing utf8 encoding in the HTTP headers
I’ve just spent a few very frustrating and completely unproductive hours trying to understand why the Ajax requests that worked in almost all browsers refused to work in all versions of IE (tested from 6 to 8) with some vague error which IE itself refused to debug properly:
- The error said “System error: -1072896658″
- Even successful Ajax response from the server for some reason caused an error handler to be executed in the Javascript
Microsoft Script Debugger which you normally use for this kind of stuff in IE6 showed me absolutely nothing (a blank white screen to be precise). Thank god that IE8 got a built in very nice debugger now. At least it was able to show me a particular line in my Javascript code. Better then nothing although the line itself didn’t explain anything.
Thanks to my natural powerful investigation skills I was able to finally narrow down the problem to the HTTP header with the charset that was sent back to the browser by the server (ie. my code on the server). I’ve used “utf8″ to specify the Unicode charset, which still looks perfectly ok to me. But since this place started to look suspicious, I looked at how other sites specify the same thing in the same HTTP header and damn — they all used “utf-8″ (with a mother effing dash!).
After I’ve changed the charset in my code to “utf-8″, all versions of IE stopped complaining. What a bizarre, bizarre thing! And even the latest and greatest from Microsoft – IE8 was also prone to this nonsense. Unbelievable.
23
Mar 09
A program manager
Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t.
We called this position a product manager instead in Stuffed Guys, but otherwise, it was exactly as Joel described with an addition of doing support as well (since we are a small company, plus support allows to be closer to the actual users and understand better what they need).
At first I was a product manager, then Ivan. But we desperately needed a separate person for that, who will not program and only manage (these two activities don’t mix well). Hopefully next time we will be more lucky and have a good product manager from the start.
This is more a note to myself to use the Joel’s article as is to describe to a person what we need from him or her.
23
Feb 09
Logitech Nano
I got it and it’s wirelessly amazing!
And yes, macro-no-flash mode rules in Canon IXUS.
3
Feb 09
Read the Diffs
And again Eric Sink writes things that I tend to agree with –
Do you work as part of a software team? Here’s a piece of advice for you:
Read the diffs.
Every morning before you start your own coding tasks, use your favorite diff tool to look at all the changes that everybody else checked in the day before.
via Read the Diffs.
We, in the Skoosh development team use this quite a lot. Our code is in CVS and we use a neat tool called CVSSpam which emails colored diffs of all commits submitted to the repository to all the developers.
So many times I’ve discovered bugs (including my own) just by reading the diffs in the email after the commit. It’s really a nice (and easy) way to review the code.
